Dead

January 22, 2018

I am told that Joe Frank is dead. My parents are both in their early eighties. Joe was 79, and according to all reports, has been dying for quite some time. I think this is the benefit one is likely to get from

A. Having doctors (who will guess how many months you have to live).

B. Eating your veggies. and

C. Being athletic enough to recognize what kind of damage and destruction your body can actually take.

On that third point, I feel especially sorry for the guys who wait until they are 47 to do any exercise, and then declare in front of the After Camera that after six weeks, they are in the best shape of their lives. That proves only that he was never an athlete and it has only taken him 35 years to use the pair he grew and face some actual pain in order to gain. I don't know what Joe's case was, but he could see the writing on the wall from his position.

There isn't much to say except to be glad that Joe didn't die in complete obscurity. I'm thinking that there are still only 50,000 people who read what I've read and internalized the monologues of those who have inspired me in the English language. We are not the chatting class in its entirety, those gates have been clambered by a larger mob than us, and I can't say that I've met any sizable subset of them or their sponsors. So I rattle off a set of names and they all lead me to the same kinds of characters, those of us who would be served and satisfied by a rebirth of the blogosphere or whatever its bastards become. I remember the radio. I remember the arthouse. I remember Spaulding Grey, Joe Frank, Henry Jaglom, Wallace Shawn. Does anybody?

It doesn't matter. Joe is part of me.

When I die, I hope that I have enough runway. Maybe then I'll do my best work.

June 19, 2015

Charleston, South Carolina has existed in my mind as an ideal city for a couple years now. I've been thinking about places to live in my retirement, old age and dotage and the place comes up often. In fact, I was just discussing the subject this weekend with my sister's family from Rhode Island. Myself, I need woods and water, good food and good folks. I prefer no state taxes and a mix of urban density, local color and proximity to wilderness. My wife wants no snow, no rednecks & no boredom. Her requirements are much more difficult than mine. Unfortunately they land us in New Mexico and perhaps Eastern Washington. We may end up in New Zealand, after all.

My good friend BB has extolled the beauties of the island plantations down Charleston way, and I've checked out the real estate. I've often imagined our families enjoying the place together with dogs, golf and fishing. Delicious. But yesterday morning he tweeted out some alarm. He said it felt like being kicked in the chest. So I googled the headline and found nine shot to death.

I've already decided that there's nothing good to come of this awful news, but I am rather stunned at the rapidity with which the discussion around it has polarized itself into competing narratives of culpability. We all should know by now that it has become common practice in Obama's America to exploit tragedy for political 'teachable moments', but the extent to which this has gone finds me deeply troubled. It is as if respect for common sense and dignity has fallen completely out of social currency and every soul must go an extra mile to extract a moral toll from the public. We have, at last, destroyed the moment of silence. And I suppose that includes me simply by writing this.

So then if I must admonish, and I don't feel that I must, yet I fulfill the expectation, let me admonish towards common sense and dignity. If you cannot place a flower on the grave of the dead, then don't pepper your speech with their names. One homily will suffice, and that is the choice of the families of the dead. Heaven forbid they start the talk show circuit.

Here is a crime for which there is ample precedent for punishment. I am unabashed in my support for the death penalty although I am skeptical that many states are worthy of its responsibility. South Carolina, I don't know. Let justice be done.

I am not impressed with the grandstanding of identity, history, cultural significance or all of the other attributes shouting for recognition, attached to the tragedy as they are by the media mob. I wonder if some folks actually lack the sensitivity to be moved unless the race and religion of victims and perpetrators are lavished with attention. Should we have to know what happened 150 years ago in the church? No we should not. People are binding their conspiratorial worldviews to the actions of a maniac and spreading their suspicions upon totems of their fetishes. The Confederate battle flag did not cause this murder. The NRA didn't sanction it. The African Methodist Episcopal Church didn't have it coming to them. Unarmed Christians didn't deserve it. The City of Charleston did not create an environment conducive to it. Their police officers did not conspire to leave the suspect alive, contrary to normal behavior. The reporting of the media by not including the word 'terrorism' is not significant. I would like to think of myself, and so I counsel myself to be a sober judge of events. A sober judge is, after all and in the end, the sort of human being we human beings are most likely to face and heed in the aftermath of tragedy and pursuit of justice.

It's about time for me to drop the mic, or gavel as it were, and observe my own respectful silence. Before I do, tipping my hat to Walter Sobchak, I'll hand it to a man who speaks for the ages.

"Men are qualified for liberty in exact proportion to their disposition to put moral chains upon their own appetites,—in proportion as their love of justice is above their rapacity — in proportion as their soundness and sobriety and understanding is above their vanity and presumption — in proportion as they are more disposed to listen to the counsels of the wise and good, in preference to the flattery of knaves. Society cannot exist, unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere; and the less of it there is within, the more there must be without. It is ordained in the eternal constitution of things, that men of intemperate minds cannot be free. Their passions forge their fetters."

Edmund Burke. “Letter to a Member of the National Assembly,” 1791.The Works of the Right Honorable Edmund Burke, vol. 4, pp. 51–52 (1899).[www.bartleby.com/73/1051.html]

December 12, 2014

I get alerts from local law enforcement, and have for a year or so. So I get texts when a shooting goes down or children are abducted in my corner of LA County. Today I saw a story about a man who dropkicked a toddler with his steel-toe boots, stuffed her face down into the sofa and left her for dead. He's arrested for murder one, of course. I am, in short, accustomed to hearing about tragic events. I'm glad to be the kind of mature man who doesn't lose his cool as I know this kind of thing happens all of the time, every day in this country and every country around the world. But I am sick to death about the obsession and symbolic outrage that has captivated so many people. I'm even tired of mocking the idiocy.

It may seem to some that because of my determination to keep a stiff upper lip about such matters, as I enjoy reading military history and thinking about how to think about death and destruction, that I have lost some measure of sensitivity to the human condition. Nothing could be further from the truth. I know what people need when death comes calling. Just this weekend there was a suicide near my wife's place of business. I know I helped her deal with it. No I'm not a psychologist, but I've been around the block and you can tell me anything. Anything. I'm that guy. And I truly, honestly want to help people make it through. That's why I am an Emergency Response volunteer and why I'll be volunteering with the local PD next month. My aim is to be skilled in that regard. Hands on.

This is precisely why all the blatheration, as much as I love a good debate, is making me irascible. It's why I'm turning some of it off. There is a limit to how much one man's death can mean and there are few things more repulsive to me, when so many people experience tragedy, than celebrity victims.

I know that it is impossible for someone like me to give any comfort to someone who is emotionally distraught about their feelings for a celebrity supermodel who alleges sexual assault by a celebrity comedian who know in what state who knows how many years ago. Impossible. All such people want to hear are Amens the specific political sentiments that motivate them. I cannot provide comfort to people who have decided to be purposeful in their discomfort. It is the big brother in me that compels me to want to shut them up and have them listen to the comfort of reason. Ragers want to rage.

Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Trayvon Martin. All are celebrity victims. Their deaths, they being human beings with one soul - equal to that of any other ever born or yet unborn all deserve their respects. It's the amount of respect one could pay in a few hours at a wake or funeral (Which I seem to be going to more and more these days). But their deaths have been celebrated as omens, and they have been made great symbols. I am weary of the minds ensnared in that dirty business. They have made a tawdry spectacle of it all with their empty gestures, hashtags and manufactured outrage.

The more dignified I want to be, the more angry I get at the indignity of this political circus. I will find a way to maintain my engagement and my peace of mind. For now, I'm changing channels.

(The picture is the grave of Marie Laveau in New Orleans to whom I'm distantly related. People leave tokens)

August 13, 2014

I've read about 50 headlines and nothing more, but I already know the narrative. Ferguson, Missouri, a town I never heard of, is now the last stop on the Protest Train. All Aboard!

It goes without saying, although people would try to blame me for not saying, so I'm saying it up front, that police brutality is a crime, and a wrongful death in police custody seriously retards faith in democratic institutions. But then I think it should be equally obvious that some of these small backwater towns are institutionally bankrupt and the people know it. That doesn't get 20 million tweets or any competent attorneys from our top law schools interested in improving the quality of municipalities in Missouri. Nor does the hopelessness of the locals impel them to load up the truck and move. You'll hear all over the interwebs what a crappy place Ferguson, Missouri is in perfect clarity as if this killing were the perfect storm everyone saw coming over the horizon. Yeah but you didn't evacuate.

No man is an island and every man's death diminishes me. But rather like gravity it diminishes with the square of the distance. Socially, politically and physically that place is a long way away and no amount of echoes in the media is going to bring it closer to me. Aside from that, I'm supposed to be an independent thinker; well, I am. What strikes me this week, is how we really don't know what's boiling on the inside of people's heads. We don't know about cops, we don't know about robbers, we don't know about comedians or actresses. We just remark a lot when somebody dies.

It has been some time since I have thought about the Coalition of the Damned, and I misread something yesterday that gave me pause. Somebody said that folks 'showed up for a peaceful protest dressed like they were ready for combat'. At first I thought it was the crowd and I thought, what a wonderful idea. But it turned out, predictably, to be the police.

If the death of one man, by accident, or on purpose causes a neighborhood, community, suburb, town, ghetto or general residential district to break down civility, well I suppose you can call that person a hero by definition. His life is valued higher than law and order. Pinker has words to say on such honor codes. Essentially, they are tribal and inferior to the rule of law. But I've been saying this for years, tribal hierarchies are what people use when democratic institutions fail. Nothing at all surprising at that. What is surprising is the extent to which activists and political plotters and strategists try to co-opt the energy of tribalism and convert it back into democratic institutional power. It's really just swapping one alien committee for another. And of course the big problem is that it doesn't help the honor code or the tribe.

A real pitchfork and torches tribe working the hierarchy is ready, and I mean defiantly, militantly ready, to stare down and shoot down the System. That's what 'by any means necessary' implies, but it always turns out in America that the means of choice is sublimation to the New Committee (which seems always ready to grant permanent seats to Jackson or Sharpton). It almost makes you miss Khalid Muhammad. But the bottom line is, misappropriation of James Baldwin's Fire Next Time notwithstanding, the tribe is going to lose.

Nobody in the tribe is willing to take a bullet for Michael Brown. Nobody in the tribe is willing to fire a bullet for Michael Brown. But the loudmouthing will follow for years. It's all just talk.

The professionals will crank the gears in the Justice System, because the tribe unwilling as it is to be permanently anything but disgruntled will call for Justice. This reflects well upon them as Americans under the rule of law, but poorly upon them as a tribe. A tribe will call for Revenge. A tribe that gets stepped on grows remorseless terrorists. Americans, as rude as they want to be, are still constitutionally too nice for remorselessness. At least the ones in Missouri appear to fit the standard. The will get their gruntle on in due time. But they will never forget. According to precedent, the Protest Train will land in a new town within a year or two. If I remember correctly, the prior major stop was some town in Florida and the dead man was Trayvon Martin. Nobody has forgotten that yet. His name is written in iron on the locomotive.

You can also count on hearing a lot of the conspiracy theorists shout out to get the crowd to say Ho! And I've already heard one against the NRA, as in Not Representing African Americans. It's not ironic that some folks are dead frightened of guns in the 'hood. It stands to reason that people who could consider 50 Cent an idol or stand in awe of the lifestyle of Biggie Smalls are not the sort to generally be trusted with firearms. That doesn't change the fact of the Second Amendment right. All the bureaucratic means testing of Orwellian nightmares is already in place. The NRA stands against that of course, and encourages its big fat lawyers to strike down every fetter to un-infringed civil rights. But you'll never hear them called a Civil Rights (tm - Jesse Jackson Enterprises) organization from predictable quarters.

At some point, and it wouldn't surprise me under the Obama Administration (also not getting blamed for the DHS militarization of ordinary police departments) that some members of the Coalition actually decide to mix together some Molotovs and burn baby burn. Who knows, maybe even an active shooter might join the tribe and do things that only happen in gangsta movies and raps, truly fuck da police. But Michael Brown is probably not worth it, and Ferguson Missouri probably ain't the one. Maybe, in the long term we'll just say this one is worth a million dollars of looting and a couple hundred arrests. Nothing to call out the National Guard for.

While I'm at it, just to stir up a little dirt, is there anybody who is thinking about a serious swapping of democratic deck chairs through the peaceful process of protest, even a little curious about what would happen if the Ferguson looters were shooters? Isn't there something deep down inside you that thinks maybe the Founders had something actually rational in mind when they reserved the right to keep and bear arms against government tyranny? I've been arguing with people like this and I wonder if they don't quietly think that maybe... just maybe.

You may be reading this at several years distant from the event, but you should know that some sentimental segment of America are wondering in shock at the suicide of the universally loved Robin Williams, who apparently hung him self with a belt. A lot has been said about how certain things are diseases that tragically take lives. Williams had depression, but then again so do many many other people who cannot afford the best care on the planet like him. They survive. The lesson of course is that people choose suicide. They do so to kill the world and send a that world a message. I am not shocked by or sympathetic to suicides. We get 30,000 per year in this country. So likewise I am not shocked or sympathetic to those who have chosen and will choose to jump out of the civil box and commit social suicide at the hands of the local authorities in Missouri. But I would be respectful of a tribe committed to war in the streets. Not sympathetic mind you, and speaking for my class prerogatives, I would have the cops pacify such rebellion with all appropriate tactical response. But it seems to me that if Michael Brown was a real hero, he would deserve a hero's revenge. Who wants to avenge the hero? Who is prepared to get medieval?

But I think Michael Brown is just a martyr of convenience to political masterminds whose intent is to fuel the legitimacy of their committees, narratives and agendas as they scan the country for poor people who fall to their deaths on the wrong side of the law or other unusual circumstances. Nobody else gives more than a few tweets, including me. Same as it ever was. As they prove nothing, the Protest Train will roll on belching smoke, steam and noise, in circles. All Aboard!

August 11, 2014

Robin Williams was a genius. And like most geniuses, you love him or hate him. The thing that strikes me about RW is that he stuck around long enough to have a body of work that has a lot of stuff in it that nobody else on the planet would do. That is for better and for worse - but there it is.

My first reactions:

He wasn't that old, was he?

No he wasn't: 63.

Suicide, that figures.

There was nobody around to tell this guy how he was wrong, and he finally figured it out. Whoops.

Oh. Depression. Ugh. That's nasty.

That makes a lot more sense.

I don't feel sorry for him, but at least he wasn't as bad as Carlin.

Don't speak ill of the dead. Don't speak ill of the dead.

I'm going to have to write this all down.

Hmm. Dead Poets Society. One of my favorites.

I have no sympathy for suicides. You can read all about that here. Here's an excerpt that I think applies to Williams:

Woody Allen is crazy. We always knew it. You can be a crazy genius, but then you'll be one of those stupid geniuses that can't even appreciate their own value because they keep entertaining their crazy thoughts. I mean there are a billion books in a million libraries full of interesting things to fill your head with, but entertaining crazy thoughts is a waste of time. Oh yeah, and there is music, and art, and everything that has yet to be discovered on this planet. I mean, you could learn a whole new language. Or you can just decide to focus on the crazy fucked up part of your life and implode. For a long time, we all thought Woody Allen was cute because he was all neurotic and seeing shrinks, and people thought being slightly neurotic was fascinating. He just wanted to bang his own daughter. Crazy. Because the whole world is not interesting enough, right?

And that's why I thought bullet point #4. But since I have a good idea of how counselors deal with anxiety which is lightweight depression, I know that Williams probably found himself in the shoes of Pagliacci. So I wonder exactly if he ever dealt with all that by playing against type. You see there is no question in my mind that Robin Williams' best roles as an actor came from his performances as an evil character.

One Hour Photo

Insomnia

I never saw him in my wife's favorite film of him, The World According to Garp. It may turn out to be one of those avoided matters that turn out well. But I can tell you that a great deal of his mawkish sentimentalism got on my final nerve and he has singularly impressed me as being the star of one of the worst films of all time; What Dreams May Come. Awful. But when he could be balanced - when he was not in full farce mode, which only worked at a very superficial level, Williams could be good. That would be Dead Poets Society, Good Morning Vietnam, The Fisher King.

But I think it will be, in light of all this unpleasantness, Good Will Hunting that will mark him. It shows in film what he must have accomplished at some point in his life and career, the ability to live with dignity in light of an unspeakably tragic loss. Williams must have lost his own ability to lift his own spirits and could not do what our other great clowns (Steve Martin, Jim Carrey, Rowan Atkinson) have done to be serious in life.

I cannot say that Williams ever touched in me in a profound way, but it was good to have someone of his genius to be a lovable spoof. One thing Williams never did was sink into the vulgarian perversity characteristic of this age - and unlike Carlin, though Williams would do his share of moralizing, he never became shrill or pushy. You got the feeling that although he seemed to be one that could never stay serious for any length of time, that he was one of the good guys. All the more tragic for his failure. He was, still to the end, and sadly exactly Mork from Ork - a man blessed and cursed with an inability to keep still or settle his mind.

October 11, 2013

I stayed up until 2 this morning watching the final three episodes of AMC's Breaking Bad. I'm glad that's over.

The experience of the multiple seasons, which I consumed basically this year has been harrowing as time proceded, primarily because this is the kind of dramatic show I tend to avoid. Too much staring into the void, etc. The ending, outside of a few stunning dialogs and the complete destruction of hope was surprisingly wordless. There were silent tears gushing from human beings who have lost it. It seemed rather slow at the time. I expected wordification of plot and interior monologue, but met only crying eyes. The effect was useful for me to reflect upon what I knew about the characters, which was that they were complicit in their own spectacular destruction, inextricably and for the simplest reasons, just trying to deliver something to their families. Nuclear families irradiated by pride, burned down degeneratively from the absorption of too much ionizing power.

The ambition of Walter White rings a bit empty on that idea of having and holding family. Although his every rationale screams 'family', it all rather came down to a gangland omerta style of family. Family was dragged and manipulated through the darkside for a wanker's dream. What Walter White never did was teach his family. His domesticity was formal. He merely fed them. He didn't lead them by example, he didn't engage them. Yet he did provide and protect them against all odds. In that way he was a perfect manly embodiment of will whose business could only provide an inheritance unattached to actual love, caring or purpose. To Walter, family was duty but nothing else.

The car wash was never a car wash. The high school classroom was never a classroom. They were boring necessities and hiding places in the shadow of White's true calling of psychological domination. And so it was such an extraordinary adventure he took, such an exhilerating test of his qualities as a man. At every turn, he exhibited brilliant foresight, prescient character judgment, bravery, skill, nerves of steel, stunning adaptability and the kind of self-confidence anchored in his genuine conviction. He believed that in the end he could prevail, justifyably. Until he knew he was dying.

It was far, far too late. But what a downscaled drama. No red Ferraris, no silk suits, no night clubs. No gold plated guns, hot women. His double life as Heisenberg was an intoxicating power trip. Walter White had the pure thing and no insipid accoutrements. He outwitted legions. He stared down everyone, everywhere and he forced them all to obey or face the consequences. He calculated everybody's weight down to 7 digits of precision and used the extra gram to push them over the cliff slowly enough so that he could yank them back as if he cared.

But there was nothing left for them to believe in. Walter White never became invincible socially. He was too large for any family but a crime family the size of Gus Fring's operation. But he couldn't scale down the ego controlling all that power into a nuclear family sized package, and he microwaved the brains of everyone in close proximity. He built nothing sustainable into his criminal enterprise. There was nowhere to build it. Walter's world was as empty as the desert, the endless tweaking consumers, the brilliant legal and illegal hacks and the faceless, bloodless corporations. Series creator Vince Gilligan's world is devoid of structures of society that aren't weak or degenerate. The self-help circles are hopeless. The only things that function do so at strip-mall capacity. Everybody's got a hungry heart, a weak will and only desperation energizes this ill planet.

It reminds me now, remarkably like the gaming worlds of Grand Theft Auto and Saints Row. A sandbox world in which only astounding destruction can move mountains. These are worlds in which inspiration is frustrated and slow to come and only finds purchase in the hope of a spouse or a child, the lack of which is presumed and justifies a pathetic disregard for humanity. At some point everyone in this world is an unattractive housewife who drops her jaw and groceries at the sight of men of action. That's all there is. Them who can fetch the dinero, and the dirty deeds they must do.

That provides good drama for those of us who consume televised entertainment as it contrasts with what we must possess as humans lest we go so astray. And yet the radiation of such cruelty and sadness, such emptiness without pathos has a haunting banality. The empty desert heart of Gilligan's New Mexico will echo with us for a long time.

November 09, 2012

Just because I thought you might want to know, I think David Petraeus is way too smart and far too disciplined to crumble under a certain kind of political pressure. And I further think that at some point he would be duty bound to say what he knew and when about various matters that would make an ex-President look foolish, but would irreparably damage a sitting President. So instead of damaging a sitting President, he found a convincing sword upon which to fall.

I'll have to remember that trick. it's really quite simple. Hell, all he needed to do was go to South America with the Secret Service...

October 10, 2012

I would like to begin entertaining speculation about the post crash economy. When America walks off the fiscal cliff, what's going to happen? For the time being, I'll just kick this off here at Cobb, but I'm thinking about starting a whole new blog for that purpose.

I had an interesting conversation with a guy I'll call Axel F. yesterday. He reminded me that the PD in Detroit is warning people away - they are on strike and there are portions of the city that are without electricity. Axel says there is no real inflection point, but that we will boil like frogs. He mentioned the experience of a dude he knew who watched Argentina go through collapse slowly but surely.

In one way this is exactly what I expected, that you only need watch the cereal aisle and the cookie aisle. Some time before there are only corn flakes and Chips Ahoy, you will start noticing that there is a lot less variety. The difference between Vons, Whole Foods and Food 4 Less becomes smaller and smaller, and the prices for the basics creep higher and higher. Then one day there are no more raspberries. Hey? What happened to raspberries?

As it stands, there are far fewer vegetables in the US than there used to be. If I remember correctly, there used to be some 50 different varieties of apples, or was it potatoes? Now there are few. It would take someone like me a very long time to notice that there is no more kale, because I just don't eat that stuff. And what about radishes and beets? Who knows where the unpopular veggies have gone? I doubt that even vegans, in their vainglory, make much of a stink about stinky vegetables. I suspect very strongly that they too are quite literally cherry picking. I am very interested in the economies of food, because I am a foodie, and this is likely to be one of my specialties if the collaborative blog comes off. I'm simply interested to know how much of our infrastructure and delivery systems are at risk, and how exactly various market mechanisms do or do not make the proper difference. Michael Pollan is my guiding light in this matter. Still, most people's point is that they only care about food with regard to how attractive it makes them and with no regard to how sustainable the crop is.

Anyway, that's just one dimension of potential collapse I'm interested in. The other is actual civil engineering and the availability of electricity. Thirdly, I'm interested in civil defense and the potential return of chivalry.

With regard to civil engineering, isn't it a marvelous coincidence that this morning I heard on Bloomberg that part of our energy problem is that environmental legislation has just bumped up the cost of oil provision beyond the capacity of the entire refining capacity of the East Coast of the US. Basically, the infrastrucutre required to upgrade the refineries specific to Pennsylvania is insufficiently economic to make petroleum products at today's prices, given the slim margins on the cost of raw oil. One of the only ways to solve this problem would be to get cheaper oil from Canada via, guess what? The Erie Canal. So that would speak directly to what I see is an education problem. Meaning we would have to start training people to be barge operators rather than chemical engineers. That the investment in Pennsylvania oil refineries is never going to happen because it will cost 2 billion dollars, that no bank is going to loan because we fell off the fiscal cliff.

I'll speak more about chivalry in the comments, but basically refer back to matters of Neo-Victorian subjects.

August 19, 2012

The death of Tony Scott at 68 is something that upsets me because I liked his movies so much. Tony Scott made two of Denzel Washington's best movies Deja Vu and Man on Fire. Deja Vu was the most emotionally resonant time travel movies ever filmed, and Man on Fire is by any measure one of the best action films of any type.

I heard the news today that somebody jumped off the Vincent Thomas Bridge - I was driving home from my short getaway weekend. When I discovered an hour ago that it was Tony Scott, I immediately thought of what he must have thought in picking that bridge for his final chapter, the scene from To Live & Die in LA. It's difficult for me to disassociate that connection in my mind - it's a filmic way to think.

It's true that Unstoppable was probably his worst film but we can only guess at the reasons he jumped. If he was pushed, Hollywood will be on fire about it for years. As it stands, it's a dramatic exit for one of the all time great action directors.

August 02, 2012

I read Gore Vidal a little bit too young to make use of what he wrote or break too lofty in comments on his passing but there were a couple ideas that he has to want to be that I still recall the first was the idea of a scholar squirrel.

His rant against the cowardice of the professoriate was a great comfort to me in understanding how the prestige of various academics obscured the fact that there were indeed facts about history that they couldn't bear to present in full context. But that was about the extent of it and quite frankly Vidal in the end disappointed.

What annoyed me about Vidal was that he decided to take his pen and run away home, except that he made his home somewhere in Southern Europe. France or Italy, it mattered little. Essentially, he turned in his card and decided that America was no longer home. From that distance, lobbing rhetorical bombs reminded me of nobody so much as Stokely Carmichael aka Kawame Ture. I may not be forgiven for not keeping up with Vidal, but it's patently obvious to me that he didn't have the stomach for living in America. One wonders which cowardice is more odious, that which can't bear to be associated with America or that which succeeds in the fraudulent portion. Vidal criticized all the scholar squirrels, but then left them in charge of his ex-nation.

Considering that America hasn't self-destructed before his death, I guess Vidal's cowardice is all the more apparent. Then again, there may be some idyllic perfection in Southern Europe that we are all just too stupid to recognize.

Vidal was clearly at peace with the degradation of the nation he claimed to know so well. But isn't that the sort of Merovingian elan such an elitist native son given to the thrills of sexuality ought to be expected to possess? Nothing quite so awfully truthful as a sardonic old queen, eh? Especially about awful things that have the ring of truth. It doesn't make one a hero. Shakespeare's Aaron never told a lie and for his truths could spare the life of his bastard got off the evil queen. I suppose that's the best light to illuminate Vidal's legacy. He'd have us barf it all up - with the likes of Kofi Annan in charge.

The world does not, perhaps, need heroics nor courage. Gore Vidal might be a suitable boy for that world of boys and girls who needn't do anything but wish away war and sun themselves in Mediterranean light. But Rabbi Hillel said, when there is no hero, you be the hero. That calls for presence of mind and body and dedication to some risky propositions. None of which seem to be at issue for Vidal at his remove from a nation lying in the lee of the winds of property ownage, civil liberties strewn about like so many trailer parks.

He said, back in 2001:

Once alienated, an 'unalienable right' is apt to be forever lost, in which case we are no longer even remotely the last best hope of earth but merely a seedy imperial state whose citizens are kept in line by SWAT teams and whose way of death, not life, is universally imitated. Since VJ Day 1945 ('Victory over Japan' and the end of World War II), we have been engaged in what the great historian Charles A Beard called 'perpetual war for perpetual peace'. I have occasionally referred to our 'enemy of the month club': each month a new horrendous enemy at whom we must strike before he destroys us. I have been accused of exaggeration, so here's the scoreboard from Kosovo (1999) to Berlin Airlift (1948-49).

You will note that the compilers, Federation of American Scientists, record a number of our wars as 'ongoing', even though many of us have forgotten about them. We are given, under 'Name' many fanciful Defense Department titles like Urgent Fury which was Reagan's attack on the island of Grenada, a month long caper which General Haig disloyally said could have been handled more briefly by the Provincetown police department. In these several hundred wars against communism, terrorism, drugs or sometimes nothing much, between Pearl Harbor and Tuesday 11 September 2001, we always struck the first blow.

It's achingly familiar. How about this?:

Jews, blacks, and homosexuals are despised by the Christian…majorities of East and West. Also, as a result of the invention of Israel, Jews can now count on the hatred of the Islamic world. Since our own Christian majority looks to be getting ready for great adventures at home and abroad, I would suggest that the three despised minorities join forces in order not to be destroyed. This seems an obvious thing to do. Unfortunately, most Jews refuse to see any similarity between their special situations and that of the same-sexers.

Is there nothing but irony in Vidal's screeds against Christians and Christianity? Perhaps so. But you would think a more reasonable atheism would have emerged from his diatribes against the 'sky gods'. In that too, I took some measure of distance against monotheism. In fact, it more clearly places my initial discovery of Vidal back in the late 80s as I first gave the faith vs reason arguments full run in my head, as well as the delights of polytheism.

But there is no discipline but the aesthetics of those celebrities whose names don't leave our memories with the swiftness that their arguments lose their coherence over time. And we are left with nothing but memories.

I think of how obvious the minds I was raised on have failed utterly to recognize what liberties would be generated by those of us who have crafted bit by bit, the information revolution. I just have to grudgingly admit to myself that the men of letters have long abandoned the town squares they have claimed to defend. And now Vidal lies dead, another dead man whose letters will be decomposed, debated and deleted in his absence.

July 26, 2012

Sherman Hemsley was probably a very interesting man, but we don't know anything about him. At least I don't. It would be nice to find something about the complexities of the actor who played George Jefferson; I simply remember his cackle. And of course there's the theme song. Who doesn't know the lyrics?

It never occured to me that the apartment of the Jeffersons could possibly be worth wanting. Where I come from, only the poorer people live in apartments. Wealthy people had houses with swimming pools. Where was George Jefferson's swimming pool? I grew up in Los Angeles, and it must be said that there were only four people in all of those proto-black television shows that could be called attractive. That would be

Thelma Evans - Good Times (but who names their child Thelma?)

Michael Evans - Good Times

Dwayne Nelson - What's Happening! (but stupid and superstitious)

Lamont Sanford - Sanford & Son

We all wanted Lamont to get together with Thelma and have their own TV show. Quite frankly, Lamont Sanford was the only full-grown man with reasonable emotions, intelligence and good looks. All the rest of them, as far as I was concerned, were charicatures of characters. They should have all been skits on the Flip Wilson show.

George Jefferson got Whitey.

There was only one other character, who came to become a stock character of the Seventies, who could get Whitey on a regular basis. That was the always loud, always angry black police sargeant. George Jefferson got Whitey in two doofus forms. One was the effete neighbor Tom, and the other was the bumbling doorman Bentley. The joke wore thin. The show wore on.

Geez, there's not much else to say is there? The rest is personal because I grew up at arms distance to black Hollywood and am not unfamiliar with both Canebridge or the Al Fann Theatrical Ensemble, the twin powerhouses of black talent pumps into the maw of the Industry. There was also PASLA an acronym whose meaning I forget but whose people I remember every time I roll west up 54th Steet off Crenshaw. There were so many kids around my age just breaking barriers in the 70s on their way into mainstream music, TV and film that I almost got caught up in the stampede. But what Hollywood wanted was a corral of scruffy black moppets - cabbage patch kids, modern day Little Rascals.

Of course there were better and there were worse. I can't remember anyone saying anything bad about Sounder, or Brian's Song. But having been involved in the making of Julia and back stage for a bit at Gunsmoke, I knew the likelihood of something approaching the basic reality of my own family life was not bloody likely to get on the air, although I did get onto an episode of the Louis Lomax Show. Hmm.

What Sherman Hemsley must have known and suffered through in Hollywood certainly informed Robert Townsend. There was nothing approaching my demographic until his partners in crime made the scene, and no moment captured the attention of my slice of that until Bobby Brown's My Prerogative video. The energy and dynamism of that sweet spot of the New Jacks. Things were finally accurate enough to be called 'real'.

I never met a black entrepreneur like George Jefferson, but I knew of his counterparts in the Civil Service and political stomping grounds which were my father's domain. I saw scrappers in beige three piece suits who approached the smooth sophistication of the king of all proto-black television - Barney Miller's Ron Glass, and others who were frighteningly more like Idi Amin, grinning tyrannical satraps. George Jefferson in real life would have cursed up a hurricane. A short, unattractive one like Hemsley would have been an engineer or a doctor - but they got the insufferable ego right. Never underestimate the moxy of a black man who gets Whitey.

I suppose that I could get into an argument about what expectations anyone should have about the social significance of black Americans' first experiences and adventures in broadcast television. I'm content to say that it was what it was. I was much happier to see the likes of Max Robinson, Bryant Gumbel and Bernard Shaw, real men, not characters written for comedic effect.

December 18, 2011

Now that Christopher Hitchens is dead, the English speaking world is going to be able to get by with a little more bullshit. I'm going to have to find someone else, we all are, who can write well, tell the painful facts about the preservation of liberty and knock back a few like a man who appreciates life. When I began to be a writer, I learned something important which is that you don't have to have a humble opinion and you don't have to apologize for the one you have,unless of course you are wrong. What's fortunate is that we live in an era where it still appreciated around certain parts, that one can inform one's wrong opinion, and better men still do. Hitch was one of the best because his was about as informed an opition as anyone who is not a machine can be.

Hitchens reminds me of several virtues. The first, and probably foremost, is that if one is a man one should always remain a man. None could say that he was a dupe, or a tool, a fool or a lackey. He was his own man and he wrote his own words. He traveled to places and looked to see things with his own eyes. He had friends, and parents. I recall these things about Hitchens which are aspects of the lives of many other public figures that seem to disappear into their auras.

I must mention with some sadness the reviews I have readabout his passing, last and probably least of those passed on by Serwer by some heretofore unknown hack at Slate, a magazine which has become barely tolerable even as it wrecked Hitchen's last RSS feed. It seems that nobody I've read has seemed to find anything worth saying about him that outweighs his intolerance of the illogic of religious belief. It's as if he had no life or work worth mentioning before 'God is Not Great'.

For the time being, I am not the writer I used to be and am not trying to wax particularly eloquent on literary matters, although my tastes for good writing continues to serve me against the wailing of Hitchens' anklebiters. Still, I await Martin Amis' migration here and will continue to read what's good, little of which I expect to contradict the truths of Hitchens' life. In fact, until Amis writes his obituary, nothing will have been said, as far as I'm concerned. And yet it is that thing that I leave in limbo, my life as a writer, that is re-energized by the slavish and muddled opprobrium slap-dashed in Hitchens' general direction. Still, I should remember not to be defensive...

February 11, 2011

If one is to believe Merkel, Sarkozy and Cameron, then Multiculturalism was some sort of government experiment in Western Europe designed to liberalize immigration rules for Muslims. That's one way to look at it. We'll see how far that definition and context lives on in the American academy. Who knows?

Note that there is an error in the translation. Sarkozy says we are a secular nation, not we are a Catholic nation as indicated in the text.

Just this week, I caught the tail end of an NPR broadcast on the matter of how a flea jumps. The researcher who had been vindicated by a high speed slo-mo electron microscope was not particularly excited. He had always maintained that a flea jumps by using their feet, but the prevailing theory said it was its knee. The scientist said he was not surprised by the results proving him right because he thought the other idea was as silly as somebody saying "I am going to jump off this chair by clenching my buttocks".

So multiculturalism is as dead as the flea's knees theory, but people won't be sure until they see it all in slow motion with electron microscopes. That's what blogs are for. I think everything he says makes perfect sense, and that is that faith is a private matter subsumed within national identity. Whatever one wishes to be in a religious or ethnic sense, it has never really been trans-national, and proper Multiculturalism, as I mentioned many years ago, has not matured in this country or evidently in the UK, Germany and France, outwardly. Instead it has been inwardly focused, and it has been a failure. I review and update my position here:

Class Three - PCThe principles of multiculturalism are well suited to resolving issues but we suffer from a surfeit of dialog about the laziest version, political correctness. PC is nothing more than the "don't ask don't tell" version of multiculturalism, it is the false pretense that everything is relative and that we can all enjoy each other's cultures with a Coke and a smile. So long as we don't offend, we can 'all get along' and society is better off. But PC demands no real understanding nor even an effort.

I should add to this that PC is essentialist. The effort made not to offend presumes that the offense is absolute and that the person to which the offensive comment is made must be offended in ineffible but inevitable ways. Therefore all effort must be made never to offend because that class of person would always suffer.

Class Two - Diversity & PluralismDiversity is one step up from PC and makes pefect sense. However it is misaplied as a principle when it's really just a strategy. The value of diversity is that it stands as an indicator of a willingness to make the effort to be inclusive. The best of diversity delivers a kind of robustness, it fortifies an institution by giving disparate groups an interest in its sucess. But this need be done purposefully with the intention of maintaining that robustness without losing links.

Pluralism is not a consequence of diversity, rather I think it the proper result of a non-chauvanistic secularism in a democratic society. You can have a healthy pluralism without the attempted mutual understanding of diversity. I think they reinforce each other but that they are not the same.

These days I am not so sure that those links need to be strong. In fact I doubt that they can be if the matter of inclusiveness is based on merit. In other words, an institution that embraces diversity in a post-discriminatory fashion will right itself by establshing and defending meritocracy. The previous outsiders, by merit are now insiders. But if the outsiders maintain links to the out group, on what basis should that outgroup feel welcome? If it is by anything but merit, then it defeats the purpose of inclusion. If I say that I want Affirmative Action into Big League Baseball just like Jackie Robinson, then it renews suspicion on the entire enterprise. So 'links' to outsiders who get included on the basis of the point of discrimination makes it nothing more or less than reverse discrimination. That is the kind of hope that should not be kept alive.

Class One - DiplomacyA proper multiculturalism is probably best described as a 'panglossos'. It involves a non-trivial understanding of history and language of the peoples of different cultures and traditions. It is diplomatic but not necessarily integrative. It is the most difficult to achieve, of course, because bridging such gaps are very difficult. Imagine giving up the principle of 'innocent until proven guilty' as the character portrayed by Richard Gere in 'Red Corner'. Respecting alien systems of governance, wedding and burial traditions, oral and written history etc are tremendous undertakings.

Diplomacy can be nothing more or less than the diplomacy of nations and extraordinary global jet-setters. Multiculturalism doesn't help anyone more average establish 'diplomatic relations'. If you want a friend, buy a dog. If you want diplomatic relations, marry somebody who doesn't speak your language and get along with your new in-laws. Outside of that..

August 28, 2010

The Economist published a rather tepid estimation about the entire effort of Iraq. I have to admit that the President has done an admirable job of shutting down the war and shutting up everybody about it. From my perspective, the entire Iraq enterprise has basically faded into obscurity. I haven't thought about the entire enterprise in retrospect from a geopolitical standpoint for a number of reasons, mostly because I do not percieve a coherent theme in the Administration's actions which sustains active analysis. Obama is a canny balancing act among crushing themes of his own choosing, but he doesn't respond to the world I care about with anything more than a chummy populism.

What I have learned greatly about the past years of this sort of wartime America is that it passes beneath penetrating analysis on a set of minimally relevant, yet maximally memetic political themes. A stunningly obsessive amount of blather and ink has been wasted on the term 'WMD', something I noted that GWBush seemed to have invented and the entire political class digested as if they had been using it their entire lives. And so I have endured that polarizing debate more times than I care to remember.

There were endless tangents that occupied our attention as we occupied Iraq in the pre-sovereigty phase of Bremer's deBaathification disaster. It was during that period when I followed the paths of battles - First and Second Fallujah, and the fate of The Wanker, Moqtada al-Sadr. Like most supporters of the mission to liberate Iraq, I was acutely interested in the lack of battle reportage and the timidity of most reporters, embedded or otherwise. I was disappointed in the prejudice against the American military's abilities and conduct as exemplified by the outsized disgust over this or that looted antiquity and whose head got burned on that hot hood of a Hummer. And these mealy criticisms grew to a crescendo culminating most seriously in ultimately dismissed charges against Marines accused of a 'massacre' at Haditha.

I expected all American interest in this war to end rapidly as the number of troops killed surpassed the number of victims of the 9/11 attacks. But I didn't expect that so little of the nation's focus would be on matters tangential to the actual results of the most important fact of the war - that counter to the Baby Bin Ladin Theory which predicted conflicts breaking out all over the Middle East in response to the presence of American forces in the area, Iraq became the center of gravity for all of the region's Jihadis. In that regard, this was the war that Americans like me wanted, and our generals gave every Jihadi the opportunity of their suicidal desires. That we had to drain the swamp in Iraq amongst the deathly emnity of deBaathified Iraqis and civilians gave patriots and dissenters all of the moral ambiguity any war is bound to provide. Nothing exemplified the mess like the matter of Abu Grhaib.

The fundamental difference between Iraq and normal war seemed to be something most opponents I encountered didn't much bother to concern themselves with. What we never did in Iraq which we always do in 'Geneva Conventional War' is to treat every one of the enemy male population of fighting age a potential soldier. In that case, the American army would move through a town and capture or kill every one of them. That's how you capture a town and control territory. But in our pre-Surge ROE, we had a hybrid and failing apporach which proved an ineffective counter-insurgency. We rousted all those men from their beds, queried them on the spot and let them go, or cycled them through - based on our whims and reckoning - soon overcrowded prisons. The same ones Saddam used against his political enemies.

And so critics of the Bush Administration's war aims and conduct had a field day in the media accusing America of torture and breaking the Geneva Conventions. This all happened as a direct consequence of our troops NOT using artillery and continuing shock and awe. So we didn't kill, we mass arrested, taking sniper bullets and IEDs in the long, arduous and increasingly unpopular process. The spillover domestically with controversies surrounding AG Gonzales, warrentless wiretaps, GTMO and conspiracy theories and controversies around Dick Cheney, Valerie Plame, armor appropriations, John Murtha and a dozen other political fires smoldered for years as the entire nation politicized itself over the merest provocations, squabbling like brats while the Greatest Generation still lived.

For all that, you'd think that the following administration would make use of the successes and promise more than the previous. But that failed to be the case. No redeeming value has been articulated beyond the obvious. Saddam is dead and we're outta there. And so we are left to our own interpretations. There is obviously a great deal more I might say about the US in Iraq. I have long held that the great triumph of GW Bush, which I still hold to be the case, is that he managed to raise and keep high the respect most Americans have for its military. No longer were our primary military actions shrowded in secrecy and contemptible deniability. Bush said in front of the world, these are our enemies, this is what we intend to do, follow or get out of the way. That's the kind of leadership armies deserve and it is what they got. WMD might have been an abused and misfortunate term, but Axis of Evil remains potent and relevant to this day.

America showed success in both overwhelming global projection of shock and awe as well as success in COIN through the Sons of Iraq, and Petraeus has mastered that flexibility in extraordinary capability and style. We generated capabilities appropriate to the facts on the ground and executed, ultimately against tyranny and for democracy. But it was a failed revolution, and speaking for myself as a neocon, I have certainly come to understand that liberty's revolution can be sponsored best only after it is authored. Bush was not the author of Iraq's liberty - so his legacy as a liberator is dubious. But his leadership left no questions in American minds as to what lengths are required.

I may be chastened to know that liberty is not on the minds of many people on this planet as clearly and primarily as it is in mine and in those of my political cohort. That political statisticians at the Lancet could get people around the English speaking world exercised about 'excess death', and subversives like Assange at Wikileaks continue the counternarratives does not come as a surprise. I have found a new source of inspiration in the concept of revolution for liberty and armed struggle through my associations with new political allies to my left. There always remains that thing, encapsulated in our own American Revolution, worth fighting for. Today and soon those battles come to a close under our initiative and leadership on the ground in Iraq as the political promises and aims of the current President are fulfilled by closing that door. Our endgame is set and we leave the field of battle for freedom and come home to fiscal matters.

Iraq stands today with a sterling example of its future in un-partitioned Kurdistan, and the taste of freedom in its mouth behind its bloody face. I think this is the last war my generation will stand for the sake of anyone other than ourselves. It is the last gift that will stand without a much more imperial demand of self-interest. It is the last time we'll spend any money trying to clean up somebody else's mess. And in that regard marks the decline of America, an America that has managed to forget the purpose of its own freedom struggles. I am not convinced at all that this current political majority will gain strength and permanence. Those who understand the demands of liberty, including the two million who served in Iraq and Afghanistan are far too deeply immersed in that life and death understanding to suffer in silence under the political will of a majority inspired by notions of peace through speeches.

So after seven years I am sanguine about the details known by those who cared to find out, motivated and inspired by those elevating spirits that the quest for liberty always brings. Let those who care little mind their own business.

June 27, 2010

I know his real name. I know his voice. I know what he would say. I know where he has been. And now that he is on his way to heaven, I don't want to go to his funeral. I know I'm being selfish, and I don't want to face the fact of his death. It wasn't that he seemed invincible, but you figured the old bastard would be around a lot longer. This is not a eulogy. This is just something I've got to say.

It hasn't been quite a year, I don't think, since the last of my online gamer buddies died. And now here we go again. It's breaking my heart, just breaking my heart.

His tag was 'Lethalme'. Three syllables, with the accent on 'me'. He was leader of the Cult of Sun Tzu, a scabbarous wag with a salty tongue and the conspiratorial honesty of old men. No. He wasn't our leader, he was our heart and soul and center of gravity. We loved him. We loved him like a crazy uncle, like a man too wise for words who never bothered to lecture us. I would call him by his name but I never met him in person. It doesn't feel right. We lived in dozens of virtual spaces communicating in real time, but I never shook his hand or bought him a drink.

I met him about six years ago in Moscow. We were driving our Ferraris in circles around Red Square and he was cursing out some kid. And the kid said how old are you? and you must be high. He said I'm old enough to be your grandfather and I'm smoking a bowl right now. Four months out of the year he smoked bowls of weed. We would notice the change in his attitude when he was off the stuff. I thought he just enjoyed it, and I liked his discipline. He'd go out to the garage and light up because it wasn't allowed in the house. I didn't know it was because of the cancer until years later.

One day, out of the blue, we talked about USC. He went there some time around the sixties when there weren't many black folks around. We talked about old black LA, for about 90 minutes. I can't remember a minute of it, but I could tell he was a man about town. He was a musician, and got a full ride on scholarship. I forget what he played, but I know he got himself a new guitar in the last days. It was the only picture I had of him. He was happy to be learning, and it was a good expensive guitar. He said it was easier than he expected.

There's a popular commercial about the Most Interesting Man in the World. The Lethal One was the most interesting man I ever knew. He was a real life hot rodder back in 50s Los Angeles and he ran with the street racers. He played golf with Mamie Clayton's family. He was a railroad engineer. He was an air traffic controller. He was the kind of man who lived by his wits when it was necessary. He didn't dwell on the past. He made his avatar a woman who looked like her name would be Mabel or Flo. He liked drivers and shooters. He liked us.

He lived on the eastern edge of the City of Angels on the western edge of the desert. Every night he would sit out in the garage and turn on the wheel. It wasn't easy to piss him off and he wasn't arbitrary, but suddenly somebody would be on his shit list and we'd never hear the end of it. That happened to TapDancer. That happened to Ferfer. That happened to Volvo. But Ferfer got back into the fold somehow. The Lethal One wasn't vengeful.

Lethal liked me. He always spoke highly of me. He used to call me 'Six'. Said I was a good looking dude with a good looking family. He said I was pretty smart. I spent many weeks thinking about how I'd make my way out to the desert and cook up some steaks with him. Last year we all promised to get together at the Long Beach Grand Prix, but he had family in for the weekend and pulled out at the last minute. So that summer when I got tickets to Return to Forever, I tried to get him out. But he couldn't make it. I figured that I'd catch up to him sooner or later.

He was beyond discipline in the way that men who get away with it are. So I never heard him complain. Oh sure he had his moments when we talked politics and he was even into a conspiracy theory or two. But he didn't try to get people to do what he wanted them to do - he would just tell you plainly.

You could go through two lifetimes and never meet one such as the Lethal One. He was one of those characters you'd expect Rudyard Kipling to write about. A man's man, a lover of people, a disciple of a few glorious callings and a rascal as constant and faithful. He had a beautiful charisma. He never lied. He never faked the funk. He never changed his accent. He might have done several things for no good reason but he was passionate like that. He explained himself, but didn't make excuses.

I never met him in person. I never will.

And there I am again, this gamer, this virtual presence with my virtual friends all so near and dear to my heart disappearing. I have a thousand mashed up memories from a thousand hours with The Lethal One and our friends. And I'm a loser. He's off the grid.

Ooooh baby! He would say. We'd be swinging around the last corner on the Washington DC circuit in AC Cobras and he'd be in 6th or 7th place. Kudos in jeopardy! Or we'd be at the first hairpin turn at the end of the downhill straight at Mugello and everybody would want to stay clear of his havoc. Or we'd be at the old neon sign graveyard outside of Vegas and he would play Dickstepper with the shotty. He used to stand outside the near door at the Presidio and toss grenades. That was always his entrance - predictable every time. He used to drive the Mouse Mini Cooper for the Red Team on the Ring. He used to love that stupid beach map on Island Thunder. And he always used to get caught in the hallways in The Vault or coming up the ladder from the basement tunnels at . We battled together at the train stations of Black Arrow, the casino rooftops in Vegas 2, the tank field at Modern Warfare, fighting Nazi zombies in a beat up old building with a sofa in the middle of a staircase and a hundred other places. Fake soldiers dying fake deaths together, friends until the end.

The lobby is empty. The adventure seems hollow. I won't be able to draft him, pass him and let him spin out challengers on my six. I won't be able to hear him tell me for the 55th time how much better Forza is with the wheel.

I'm all disjointed. The friends on my friends list were friends because Lethal was a friend. The death of Fastlane Ken was the one of the one two, and now Lethal is dead. That's the other shoe dropping. That's the end of the era. That's the last straw. There's almost no reason to go back online to XBox Live. I'm never going to meet anyone like him again. Anywhere. Ever.

I don't know what stage I'm at now. Anger I think. Lethalme was one of those men whom if you had them as a friend, and I did, you would never need a psychiatrist. I feel the planet one man lighter. Less alive. And I feel that somehow I have to be part of him now that he's gone. I have to let some of him live in me beyond the effects I experienced. But I have to move on. I can't sit here and regret that I don't have a voice recording all transcribed for my library. I have to be that guy. I'm angry at God. That's what kind of man we lost. The kind of man whose absence makes you mad that you have to live post-.

I have to wring out all of my sentiments. Death comes to us all. Cancer. Well you only temporarily beat any disease. Sooner or later something kills you. We're all in remission. We all relapse. Life itself is a bedside vigil.So you do right while you're alive. You make your mark. You love your people and you make them remember the pride and the joy and the energy and fortitude of your life. The Lethal One did all that and I am glad to have known him in the narrow way I did, through this electronic network that augments our ability to cover distance and time. His life came through it and he touched me on this side. It was a human encounter and it came through in his voice and through his transmitted actions. It was a friendship that lasted for years. It has produced fond memories that will be with me until my end.

May 15, 2010

'A Peoples History of the United States' is the book for everyone but history majors. It gives a crunchy satisfaction to all of our hungers to confirm that we have been hoodwinked, bamboozled and led astray. It comes to the top of the list just ahead of 'Lies My Teacher Taught Me' in the query of what *really* happened in America, now that we can say so. But it is far from the most profound book I've ever read. In fact, I think it led me a different color of astray, in that it gave me a sense that there were once brave, young, intelligent men and women who decided once and for all that good government was the highest calling and things went from worse to better. Howard Zinn's great work is a sweet categorization of the good, the bad and the ugly in American government. But.

The most profound book I have ever read has to be not a single book but the Neveryon Trilogy. It is the encapsulation of a mythical period on a distant world that tells the story of a feudal society's evolution into literacy. Anyone who would study history must surely be aware of the essential paradoxes of, as Niall Ferguson puts it, communing with the dead. But Neveryon as fiction did not have that problem, and yet it reads very much like a history complete with archetypal stories of slave uprisings, creation myths, golden children, errant knights, evil tyrants and prodigal sons. The key to Neveryon and how it affects me greatly is it show a society that minds its own business because it is illiterate and then it shows how literacy changes what is on the minds of peasants and how this new skill, once privy to the nobility now set free, changes power.

When I read Neveryon, I was very much interested in matters of the canon wars and cultural production. Now it speaks to me on a broader basis which is that basis of understanding the forces that provide the gift of literacy and content. That is to say, whose interest does it serve for the masses to know anything? What does it matter what you know, and therefore who owns your attention?

It is in this context that Zinn's People's History should be taken into account because its very existence substantiates three myths. The first and most important myth is that 'knowledge is power' when in fact power uses knowledge to whatever ends power wants. But if you believe that myth, then you can believe the additional two, that history before Zinn was less informed and that after Zinn we are better informed. If Zinn corrects, then there was something wrong before Zinn and something right after Zinn. But that is not actually within our place to say because we, idiot peasants like me, are drawn to the book because of this promise.

Where is Zinn's revolution? It is a question somebody will have to write down and sell. Or perhaps that was Zinn's end in and of itself. He raised the question that stuck. What was America before it had a People's History, and what is it now that it does?

April 17, 2010

They say that if you can't say anything good about somebody, you shouldn't say anything at all. This may be a short entry.

Yet I don't have any words to malign Daryl Gates. He stood in opposition to a lot of his peers who came down on him hard in the wake of his oversight of the police beating heard around the world. Rodney King and Daryl Gates are a pair whose lives are intertwined in the public consciousness - a consciousness which has slept for quite a while. After Gates came Williams. After Williams came Parks after Parks came Bratton. There's a new guy in charge today since Bratton left, and I don't even know his name.

But Gates' LAPD is the LAPD of the Batterram, of SWAT, of DARE, of CRASH. Before Gates modernized and started recruiting from all around the country, including for God knows what reason, Alabama. The LAPD lived under Ed Davis. Davis was easy to hate. Davis could easily substitute in my mind for any irrational defender of Dixie, but then again I was a kid. Gates was rational. Gates was disciplined. Gates was a hardnose and Gates had black cops. Not a huge amount, and famously, many of them were meter maids under a new recruitment program. But no matter what the weather, Gates had a program.

Sometime his program didn't work. Sometimes it worked to a scary degree. The LAPD as everyone knows it, paramilitary was created by Gates. He got the hardware out there, including most notoriously, the Batterram. But for me it was Blue Thunder that most characterized the sort of feelings I got most viscerally.

Almost every weekend, where I grew up in 90016, it seemed like there would be some kind of robbery and police action on Saturday night. Ice Cube wrote a rap song called Ghetto Bird that described the situation. Gates ran the helicopters with their powerful spotlights out to crime scenes like there was no tomorrow. Being under the huge kleiglights of the modern helos gave one the kind of Big Brother feeling that had no equal. You were the target. The helicopters were loud and they flew low. They rattled windows and woke children from sleep. When they flashed on your house you knew that a foot pursuit was in progress. The public transit bus had a number on its roof. Your neighborhood was a sector on a grid for air surveillance.

We used to pretend to have guns in those Bruce Lee days. We would aim and shoot with broomsticks at the police helicopters flying over us in the daytime. They would circle, looking for somebody. We could see them looking at us. Yeah. We hated the pigs. They wouldn't let us ride our minibikes on the street. They took our nunchucks and threatened us with juvy.

If you can unseal my juvenile record, you'd find that. I was told by my parents in no uncertain terms not to ask the judge why Pep Boys could sell minibikes if they were illegal to ride on the street. They were obviously too fast to ride on the sidewalk. Who did they think we were, suicidal? So I shut up and was forgiven.

Gates had his own adjective. It was 'embattled'. It seemed like there was nothing he could do without raising the ire of my fraction of the public. He initiated the chokehold in response to his claim that suspects on PCP were immune to pain. Somebody died, or at least that's what I remember. Some wrongful death suits went on for years in our political memory. Gates gave no quarter to gangbangers. Whole neighborhoods became unsafe for civilians due to the battles between Gates' cops and those perceived to be gang members and affiliates. He initiated sweeps where your hangout became no-man's land, sweeps with arrest percentages in the 2s and 3s. You'd get in the system simply for being there, detained and let go - like human fly fishing. It earned him no sympathy, no friends and no cooperation. Everything Gates did was by the book, with no room for warm and fluffy. LA had no beat cops, no friendly cops, because there was no way on earth he could hire enough for them to leave their squad cars.

Every criticism of Gates ultimately came down to that controversial and unavoidable calculation. LA taxpayers would never spend enough on hiring officers such that the ratio of cops to people would be comparable to other big cities in the East and Midwest. We joke about donuts, but there were no fat cops in LA. They were soldiers in patrol cars, and they didn't get out of those cars in 'hostile territory' for no good reason. There was never a friendly Irish 'top o' the marnin t ye laddie'. It was 'put your hands where I can see them, sir'. Sir with a sneer.

I've often told folks that I had been detained something on the order of 27 times between the time I was 15 and 30 in LA. I was cited 3 or 4 of those times. I came to know the excuses by rote. Well I'm running a check on you because there's a Michael Bowen who just escaped from jail in Chino. Gee officer, this is the third time. Then the look that says, OK you know the drill don't you wiseguy. They hold up their maglites and check out my forearms for jailhouse tattoos, and let me drive away with a warning.

Back in my post-buppie politically radical days, I would sit in my beater in Beverly Hills parked on a side street and wait to see how long it would take some cop to tell me that I was in the wrong neighborhood and should go home. I do those kind of things, you know. I don't take anybody's word for it. I recognized the difference between the LAPD and the Beverly Hills cops, and the Sheriff's Deputies and California Highway Patrol as well. The LAPD was on a mission. The BHPD was legendarily polite. The CHP actually cared about your safety. The Sheriff's deputies were not to be trifled with, but encounters were rare. None of them were the cowboys of the notorious Hawthorne PD. Whatever could be said about Gates, he tolerated no rogues.

Hawthorne, back when I was growing up, was from my perspective, a 'white trash border zone'. Between the 'hood where I grew up and quiet upscale beach cities where I live now were two towns where our very own rednecks lived, Hawthorne and Lawndale. If I remember correctly, Torrance, immediately south of Hawthorne was one of the last places where racially restrictive covenants were defeated during the Civil Rights Movement here on the West Coast. It might have been Hawthorne, but who wants to live in Hawthorne? Lawndale is still living down its reputation. Hawthorne has since been overrun by blacks and latinos of all sorts. Legendarily Don Jackson, a black officer in the Hawthorne PD who has since changed his name to Diop Kamau organized stings once he was run off the force. This crusader has since dropped racial revenge from his agenda and serves the public trust in what I consider to be more honorable manner. But everybody has got to get through their rage. Jackson had plenty good reasons.

After Rodney King, I chased down reality with the same vigor as I loitered in Beverly Hills. I found cops doing their jobs. Good, important jobs. Long before Gates stepped down and Williams took over, I paid more attention to the politics of policing and I recognized the distance between public opinion and police policy - I recognized how race blurred the picture and ultimately served to make the police a proxy between people who didn't know each other, but trusted in stereotypes to hate each other. Gates didn't care about being the politician who could smooth things out, and so there was never any such thing as community policing under his rule. That is something that had to evolve and could only do so after Gates was out on his ear.

Daryl Gates is dead and has been politically dead for a long time, to the benefit of LA politics. I missed the Riots and what Reardon did to fix things. But today I see a much less tense Los Angeles over his dead body.

July 18, 2009

Except for his Vietnam body counts, I watched very little of Walter Cronkite and have not had the experience of perceiving him to be anything more than an icon of a distant time and place where men were men and the truth was lassooed like a bulldogged calf, wrestled to the ground and branded with the CBS eye. He was just another old white man who spoke good English to me.

My inspiration came from the likes of Fred Friendly whose aim was ". . . not to make up anybody's mind, but to open minds and to make the agony of decision making so intense that you can escape only by thinking."

Quite frankly I can't imagine at all, that Cronkite made anybody think. Which is I think entirely the point of his celebrity. You opened your craw and swallowed down whatever fish that the grave and erudite Mr Cronkite tossed you. So now he's dead and people are wondering why when we swallow today's fish it stinks and gives us bellyaches. Well what the hell was he doing in 1968? Forming a news hegemony? I think it didn't work.

The presumption that we can trust news organizations to present expositorily through one talking head, a narrative that will leave us intellectually satisfied, and satisfactorily intelligent is one that is appropriate to the peasantry of any society. So another Cronkite can and will be manufactured and the peasants will settle down. In the meantime, enjoy the New Media while we still have liberty.

October 31, 2006

I suppose it won't be long until the Reparations movement targets the Republican Party for the Southern Strategy. Wouldn't that be interesting? But just for the record, I wanted to include the official apology, just in case people are curious about the Healing part. Here's the link to the Washington Post article. And just in case that goes dead, here's the document on my site, always and forever. Download mehlmans_apology.pdf

Now let's see. Maybe we can find it in USA Today as well. Yep. Right here. Where else? Here's the Wikipedia entry for all the context that's fit to debate.

September 11, 2006

The Wave reports
that the civil rights attorney and former police commissioner died last
night when her car plummeted down a slope near her home in the
Hollywood Hills. Lomax was 56. According to the story, Lomax was behind
the wheel of her 2005 Jaguar when the car drove off her driveway,
rolled down an embankment and landed upside down on Outpost Drive.
Paramedics found her in full cardiac arrest. She was pronounced dead at
Cedars-Sinai at 8:37 pm.

Lomax was on the police commission during the Tom Bradley
administration at City Hall, served for a time as its president, and
made an unsuccessful move in 1991 to oust LAPD Chief Daryl Gates that
led to her resignation. Bradley tried to appoint her in 1992 to the DWP
commission, but her confirmation was rejected by the City Council over
the Gates issue. She later represented Willie Williams when he sought
to regain his job as chief of the LAPD. In 2001 Mayor James Hahn
appointed Lomax to the Information Technology Commission. She had also
been vice-president and general counsel for the Los Angeles NAACP.

Lomax could be counted on as a voice of reason during all of the squabbles between LA's various black communities and City Hall since way before the riots. She was always in command of the facts and could be counted on to be blunt when plain talk was needed. I can never recall her mau-mauing for headlines. A responsible party, she often spoke out on Airtalk with Larry Mantle. She'll be missed.

November 23, 2005

I'm being sarcastic. The first thing you have to understand about Tookie Williams is that this is what he looked like. Knowing that this man used to hang out at parks and beat down people for fun, that he used to force people to oil his body, gives you some idea what Tookie was all about. The Tookie I knew hung out at Centinela Park in Inglewood with another huge dude named 'Mouse' doing pullups and otherwise being as badass as humanly possible. Basically, he did whatever he wanted to, and in the end what he wanted to do was be the most intimidating and dangerous man anywhere. He got his wish of course. Who was going to stop him?

I got other Tookie and Mouse stories second-hand from a kid named Timmy Green who was a bodybuilding roughneck too. Back in highschool, Tim Green was about five feet tall and 2 feet thick. He was a devastating football player, a little walking muscle. We all suspected that Timmy was a Crip, but nobody said it straight out, after all ours was an exclusive Jesuit prep school. I heard that Tim is dead, shot by another Crip somewhere. We kinda knew that he had a deathwish. Tim owned a red Honda motorcycle, a CB400 with the swivelly pipes. I rode with him once, and I immediately experienced a kind of terror I've never known before. Tim was absolutely fearless riding on the wrong side of the double yellow line of Crenshaw Blvd at 70 miles per hour. But if you talked about Tookie, Tim showed fear. Admiration to be sure. Tookie went everywhere in LA to prove that he was the was the baddest, and nobody lived to win a challenge, but fear too. Tookie was the man that thugs feared. There could only be one reason for that. He was more than buff, he was deadly.

You could not grow up in the 'hood in Los Angeles during the 70s and not know about Tookie or the Crips. It's probably hard to understand if you didn't grow up in a roughneck neighborhood. But street smarts are just that. You are forced to rely on the human instinct for survival, you navigate the degrees of danger and you grow senses that middleclass live has no use for. Tookie today looks like somebody's grandfather but don't be fooled. Back in the day, there were all kinds of gangs, some no more troublesome than the Jets or the Sharks. Truth be told, Tookie got busted right around the time gangs were going off the chain, and his Crips were the reason. The short version of the story is this, Crips were dangerous and they "Don't die, they multiply". There came a time when they became so pervasive and dangerous that anyone not in a gang was vulnerable - and then beyond that to the point at which gangs that didn't bang hard had to get hard. The Crips in the late 70s were basically escalating street rivalries into open warfare. From fists to knives to guns. The Crips created the Bloods because the Brims and the Pirus had to bang together or hang separately. When I was a kid, there used to be a saying: 'Crips are cool, but Piru rule'. By 1980, nothing was cool.

Me personally, I've battled Crips hand to hand. I've dealt with all kinds of knuckleheads, roughnecks and thugs. But everybody knows their limits. I know I am not to be a warrior and I didn't have to go to jail to learn any of that. I didn't have to wait until somebody wrote a rap song about 'dead homies' to know what that was all about. I grew up in the black neighborhood when basically few people had a choice on where they could get real estate. I know what it's like to walk through the Jungle at night, and I know if the man cursing on the bus is actually going to swing at you. But I only know what it's like to live around people who were basically about 1/3 as dangerous as Tookie Williams.

The scariest part of my neighborhood was West Blvd over near Adams. I could go into it, but it was over there wher I learned the meaning of getting 'curbed'. Now if you're dainty, skip to the next paragraph and agree me because I'm about to describe it. Everybody knows about being 'jumped in' and 'jumped out' of a gang. Basically about 7 of them beat you down until you can't stand up. That's child's play. You basically get curbed if you rat to the cops. What does that mean I asked? Well, you lay down in the street perpendicular to the and facing curb. You open your mouth and bite the concrete corner of the curb and somebody comes up behind you and kicks you in the back of the head. People who did this were afraid of Tookie.

I cannot wait until the founder of the Crips dies at the hands of the California justice system. This convict has actually convinced people that if you write some children's books, that you can redeem yourself for a quadruple murder conviction. That doesn't say much for the state of conviction these days. So long as he fries, I can handle it.

It's not surprising that the Coalition of the Damned is up in arms about this clemency drama, and quite frankly I'm not surprised that Jamie Foxx and others have a screw loose in this matter. Clearly, they don't know what Crips are all about. I discussed this sorry SOB here and over at africanamerican.org a month or so ago, and it's amazing the amount of BS excuses go into trying to make the case for clemency. Take this one for example:

Never mind the fact that Blacks make up the majority of the prison population because White cops are 6 times more likely to arrest a Black or Latino than a White offender. And never mind the fact that the police purposely go looking for Black criminal offenders while ignoring White criminal offenders.

Never mind the fact that the police don't do stings on White gangs because they know if it got on the news, it would tarnish the false image that "White people don't do crime". Never mind all of that, that is not important.

What is important is that Blacks are criminal animals, and that's all there is to it.

Nevermind? How about nevermind the Crips. So let's inteject a little sanity. And I'm going to break a rule here and bring back a whole lot more from a site than I usually do because I want people to get a handle on what gang violence is like in LA County. As you read this try to remember that this is just about one particularly notorius set out of hundreds of streetgangs.

Rollin' 60s N-Hood Crip
Seattle Mariners

Seattle Mariners Cap

Sub Sets: All 60s are NHCs, but there are the Avenues and the Overhills that are west of West Blvd. Allie(s): Their allies include Neighborhood Crip sets such as 67 NHC, 55 NHC, and 46 NHC.

Brief History:Their main rival would be the Eight Tray Gangster Crips to the east. This would be the most intense rivalry between any two gangs in all of Los Angeles County. This rivalry goes back to 1979 and was the beginning to Crip infighting. This rivalry is discussed in Monster Kody's book Autobiography of an LA Gang Member and Donald Bakeer's book, Crips. It would be great to see a truce between these 2 sets, because so many other rivalries would come up under it and many lives would possibly be saved. Thus far nearly 400 members of both sets have died in the last 20 years and that does not include the bystanders caught in the cross fire. Also keep in mind that many of the decedents expired as a result of non-gang related circumstances such as car accident, suicide, natural causes and conflicts outside gang membership.

Comments:The Rollin 60s made news headlines when Tiequan Andrew Cox (b. 1966), who had purchased fake cocaine, sought revenge against the dealer when he mistaken a neighbor's house as the drug dealers. He was convicted in 1986 for committing a quadruple murder that occurred in 1984. The victims were the wrong targets and were related to former NFL Rams wide receiver Kermit Alexander. Cox, while on death row stabbed Stanley "Tookie" Williams in 1988. This act is depicted in the 2004 film Redemption starring Jamie Foxx but many suggested that the incident didn't play out as it did on the silver screen.

In 2003 City Attorney filed a gang injunction against the Rollin 60s Crips and they had specified 31 men that were members of the 60s, but some have suggested that the 60s were being unfairly targeted and some mentioned that the injunction included individuals that had not had police contact in several years. Below are some published articles about the injunctions.

Their main Blood rival would be the Van Ness Gangsters (VNG) to the north. Since the 60s attend Crenshaw High School, north of Slauson, they often clash with the VNGs and becasue the VNGs are a smaller gang with less membership, the Rollin 60s have been able to dominate the school population even though the high school is outside their turf.

The Rollin 60s also started a conflict with the School Yard Crips during the 1980s. This is an unusual conflict because gangs often rival with neighboring or adjacent gangs. But the Rollin 60s would show their dominance by hanging out at the World-on-Wheels skating ring on Venice in the neighborhood of the School Yard Crips uncontested many times. Although there were several shootings committed by the School Yard Crips, the Rollin 60s, for the most part maintained their dominance for several years there.

Other rivals would include all Hoovers, especially the 83 Hoover and 74 Hoover and all Gangster Crips that are hooked up with the ETGs, such as the 53 Avalon Gangster Crips and 43 Gangster Crips. The 60s and all the "Owes" were allied during the 1980s but that is not the case today.

Tookie deserves to die. Plain and simple. If he's such a saint, let's hurry him on his way to his everlasting reward.

December 13, 2004

You've got to be brilliant or crazy or a bit of both to take on the CIA singlehandedly. The bigger question is whether you can survive the success or failure of such an endeavor. All in all, the odds are against you, and now another David lies dead in the shadow of Goliath.

It was a suicide according to this article, but it might be more appropriately called a collective execution. Webb long ago lost the support of the profession, despite his willingness to go the extra mile to make his case.

The publication of his book 'Dark Alliance' set a lot of tongues wagging and eyebrows raising. But in the end it didn't prove enough to be the kind of damnation CIA haters would prefer or vindication CIA suckups desired. It showed a complicated and convoluted series of events with plenty of dirt and blame to go around. In the end, I believe that his profession abandoned him.

Webb's job may someday be internalized by massive organizations. Investigations of the sort he embarked upon over continents and years are the only way anyone can find out what goes on aside from those directing operations. In a publicly funded organization we have a right to know, even if most of us would prefer not to know.

Webb's death reminds us that there remain high prices to pay for the burden of unwelcome knowledge. Truth serves no man.